One May evening in 2022, two Filipino women — mother and daughter — went to pick up snacks at a McDonald’s drive-thru in North Hollywood when a white man allegedly rear-ended their car, drove alongside them and began to shout racial slurs, threatening to kill them.
Nerissa Roque, the mother, called the police and husband Gabriel Roque, who showed up before officers did. As daughter Patricia recorded on her cell phone, the attacker tried to open her locked door, the video showed, pushed Gabriel Roque to the ground — breaking his rib — and grabbed Nerissa Roque by her throat. A bystander intervened and stopped the assault, according to news reports.
Police did not arrest the man, Nicholas Weber. He instead received a citation to appear in court and later was charged with two felony batteries with hate crime enhancements. But a year later, the judge dropped the hate crime enhancements and charged Weber with two felony assaults and driving under the influence.
The family was stunned.
“I went there with the hope that the court would shed more light to what happened to us,” Gabriel Roque said at a July 2023 community panel on stopping Asian hate. “Instead of getting the truth out, the truth was twisted; therefore, justice was not served.”
The Roques’ violent experience follows a national trend stoked in part by anti-Asian rhetoric amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But prosecuting hate crimes successfully is rare, leaving victims disappointed.
To convict someone of a hate crime, the offense must be motivated by a person’s prejudice against an individual’s “race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity,” according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In the Roques’ case, the court concluded the evidence was insufficient for a hate crime charge due to the defendant’s actions toward a non-Asian bystander and the fact that the racial slurs took place approximately 10-15 minutes before the physical attack. The non-Asian bystander left the scene, and it’s not clear if police ever identified and questioned the witness about the incident.
Experts estimate an average of 250,000 hate crimes were committed in the United States each year between 2004 and 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. But the lack of reporting is common and problematic — the National Crime Victimization Survey found that about half of hate crimes are never reported to police.
Michael Lieberman, a senior policy counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said there are many obstacles to prosecuting a hate crime case and that often starts from the very beginning. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, SPLC is a nonprofit that specializes in civil rights and public interest litigation.
“There’s a gap in reporting,” said Lieberman, who has spent three decades working on hate crime issues, including testifying before Congress, writing and advocating for hate crime legislation. “If you don’t have accurate data, you cannot effectively address the problem. And we do not have accurate data. The FBI has been trying to collect this data since 1991.”
In Texas, for example, only eight cases ended in convictions from the nearly 1,000 hate crimes reported from 2010 to 2015, according to an analysis by ProPublica. Nationwide, prosecutors pursue charges for traditional criminal offenses — if anything — when evidence like hate speech is absent, hampering their ability to show bias after an attack takes place on people from marginalized communities.
The Washington Post summed it up this way: “Researchers, advocates and law enforcement officials have described a breakdown at nearly every step of the justice system leading to a disturbing conclusion: Hate crimes go unpunished.”
For victims, the lack of culpability is compounded by the absence of institutional support. A 2022 U.S. survey of crime survivors found that only 20% received any aid from the criminal justice system, with the majority of victims finding support in their community or the health care system. More obstacles appear for undocumented victims.
Yet these cracks in the handling of hate crimes also reveal critical reporting opportunities. Media coverage, along with pressure from advocacy groups, can increase the visibility of hate crimes and potentially keep cases from falling off the radar. For journalists seeking to investigate cases in their own community, here’s an overview of the systemic barriers facing hate crime survivors.
Lack of reporting and convictions: ‘systemic neglect’
Before a hate crime case can enter the criminal justice system, victims must acknowledge what they’ve experienced was a hate crime and report it to law enforcement.
“A major factor in under-reporting is distrust and lack of confidence in the police, especially for historically marginalized victims,” writes Brendan Lantz, an associate professor at Florida State University who studies hate crime victimization.
Lantz and his colleagues found that hate crime victims don’t report the crimes not because they thought “the police couldn’t do something” but because they thought “the police wouldn’t do something.”
Undocumented survivors are also wary of revealing their status to police. According to a 2015 report by the Center for Migration Studies and the Migration Policy Institute, 1 out of every 7 Asian immigrants is undocumented.
When survivors do come forward to law enforcement, officers must correctly identify and acknowledge the bias motivation related to the incident in order to proceed with hate crime charges. But law enforcement often lacks the appropriate training and resources for investigation. Hate crime legislation is not uniform across the U.S., and a handful of states, including Arkansas, South Carolina and Wyoming, don’t have hate crime laws at all.
“One of the most important things about hate crime laws is just to be able to call a crime what it is,” Lieberman said. “It’s just validating for the community.”
But one of the biggest problems in documenting hate crimes is lack of accountability when law enforcement agencies don’t collect this information. In 2019, 86% of such agencies reported zero hate crimes in their jurisdiction.
While that may be accurate for some jurisdictions, Lantz said, it’s statistically unlikely for the majority. Investigating this data and whether any hate crimes did in fact occur in these areas could potentially reveal “systemic neglect,” he said.
As a starting point, ProPublica developed a “reporting recipe” for journalists on how to request hate crime data from their local police departments. Some of those tips included:
- File a public records request to law enforcement agencies for records of bias-motivated crimes reported to or investigated by the agency. Here’s some guidance to write the request.
- Compare the number of bias-motivated crimes publicly reported by your local agency to what it reported to the FBI. Consider also comparing the numbers with reports from cities with similar population sizes.
- If any discrepancies or differences are found, look into the processes officers use to report hate crimes. For example, are hate crimes designated with a checkbox on reporting forms? Are any additional reviews for determining hate crimes in place?
It’s possible future policy changes could ensure more cases are reported. Journalists can write solutions stories looking into approaches that could potentially improve hate crime reporting, such as police training programs or systems outside the U.S.
In a 2020 study, Lantz and colleagues found that in the U.K., which has reporting policies that are more victim-centric, hate crime reporting has steadily increased while reporting in the U.S. decreased over the same period.
A high bar
Once a hate crime case does enter the criminal justice system, the biggest barrier to conviction lies with the evidence at hand and the prosecution’s willingness to go to trial.
Research articles and news reports reveal a chorus of prosecutors who say that hate crimes are extremely difficult to prove in court in order to obtain a conviction.
There are various reasons why so few hate crimes are convicted in court, according to a ProPublica investigation that included interviews with advocates, lawmakers and 15 prosecutors in Texas. Among the problems: difficulty proving intent, lack of will among prosecutors to pursue hate crime enhancements and lack of training for police about the necessary steps to investigate such cases.
Police training is really important, Lieberman said. For example, if there was a cross burning on a Black family’s lawn and police interpreted that as trespassing without any aspect of hate or bias, they’re missing something. “You have to have law enforcement officials that are willing and able to identify it and report it.”
Another issue is police officers, victims’ liaisons and prosecutors believing that hate crimes have a higher burden of proof than what the law requires, according to a study by Ryan D. King of the Ohio State University and Besiki L. Kutateladze at Florida International University.
But the key disconnect lies in a common assumption in law enforcement that hatred must be the sole motivation for a crime. Many state laws are written more broadly, stating that prejudice or bias against a protected class must be a motivator. And states like California even explicitly include language clarifying that hate crimes may be “committed in whole or in part” because of bias.
For anti-Asian hate crimes in particular, experts say that the lack of known racist symbolism, compared with objects like nooses in regards to anti-Black crimes, makes it more challenging to win a conviction in court. Other experts point to potential racial bias at every level of the justice system from law enforcement to prosecutors to judges that may affect case outcomes.
But there is some good news. Media coverage has the potential to impact hate crime outcomes. When King and Kutateladze interviewed prosecutors for their study, they found that attention from media and advocacy groups can keep cases on officials’ radar. In some instances, local reporting has a direct impact on cases, such as an investigative story by the Oregonian that led to officials reopening and re-examining multiple hate crime cases.
Still, survivors can wait months or years to have their day in court. The Roques, for example, waited nearly a year — the norm in many states — before a preliminary hearing date was held.
Weber, the man ultimately charged for attacking the Roques, took a plea deal and was convicted on three counts: two felony assaults and a misdemeanor DUI.
“The criminal justice process, including the gathering of evidence and the decision to prosecute, often works against those with less power and against minority groups,” King and Kutateladze wrote in their study.
“The law is a blunt instrument,” said Lieberman, and suggests that the more effective route for addressing hate crimes is prevention. He encouraged local journalists to ask law enforcement and government officials directly what they’re doing to prevent these crimes from happening.
Barriers to supporting survivors
Victims’ services programs are typically administered at the state level with the help of district attorneys’ offices. These programs offer trauma counseling and funds for relocation, wage loss and medical care. Yet vanishingly few crime survivors seem to be accessing these services.
A large national survey of crime survivors reported that 74% did not receive mental health counseling, a particular concern for Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, as this population rates among the lowest when it comes to receiving mental health services generally.
Ninety-six percent of crime victims did not receive any victim compensation to help recover from their experience, the survey showed. These statistics reveal a breakdown between victims and governmental resources, which as of February 2024 total over $1.2 billion in the federal Crime Victims Fund.
In early 2024, the Justice Department proposed reforms to address the subjective nature of evaluating victim compensation after an AP investigation exposed racial disparities in the system. The news organization’s reporting showed that Black victims were disproportionately denied in many states, often due to factors stemming from implicit bias.
While the proposals are still pending, the AP’s investigation could serve as a roadmap for reporting on bias that may affect other groups, such as the Asian American and Pacific Islander community or undocumented immigrants.
What happens to survivors ripples through communities. Many Asian Americans shared in a 2021 poll that racial bias and violence impacts their mental health.
“Hate crimes are unique as a crime in that they do reverberate through the community in a way that other crimes don’t,” said Lantz, the Florida State University professor. He points out that people in the Asian diaspora may experience their own feelings of distress and lack of safety when hearing about hate crimes that could have happened to them.
“That’s something that our criminal justice system and law enforcers don’t always take into account on the same level,” he said. “Bringing that extra hate crime charge has meaning even if you could have gotten a punishment another way.”
Tiên Nguyễn is an award-winning journalist, independent filmmaker and reformed PhD chemist. Her work spans history, science and human rights with a focus on uplifting historically oppressed communities. Her stories have covered death, drugs, dino poop and more for outlets including Chemical & Engineering News, Nature, PBS, Scientific American and VICE News. Born in Vietnam and raised in North Carolina, she’s now based in Los Angeles.